After years of a disastrous
free-for-all on the sea, one Oregon fishing community searches for
a sustainable future

PORT ORFORD, OREGON — The
wind rattles everything in this small fishing village on the
southern Oregon coast: the naked masts of the wooden ships, the
awnings of shops along a sparse main street, the broad leaves of
the myrtle trees.

Yesterday, retirees crowded the dock in
late afternoon to watch ships unload buckets of squirming
groundfish. Not today. Down by the port, aside from the sound of
waves hurling themselves against the concrete pier, things are
quiet. Gone are the men in bright yellow and orange rubber
overalls. The few scattered buildings wear an air of abandonment.
Nature has decided: There will be no fishing today.

"I
once got caught out on a day like this one, and it’s not
something I’d want to do again," says veteran fisherman Harry
Allen from the safety of his kitchen. Allen will spend the day
painting old buoys and cleaning out tubs recently filled with
shrimp. As he and his 2-year-old son, Ronan, duck into the large
garage where he stores his pots and buoys and vats full of fish,
Allen, a former machinist crewman for the Coast Guard, grumbles
that it’s not just the weather that has grounded
today’s fishermen. There are plainly fewer fish to be caught.

Over half of all salmon stocks along the West Coast are
either threatened or endangered. All commercial abalone species,
ravaged by overfishing, are now off-limits to fishermen. And nine
of the 16 species of groundfish in the region — species such
as lingcod, Pacific Ocean perch and canary — are below 25
percent of their historic population, which explains why, in 2002,
fishermen along the West Coast caught 96 percent fewer groundfish
than they did in 1990. Competition with large trawl ships —
coupled with tougher federal regulations — spells tough times
for small-boat fishermen like those in Port Orford.

"I
used to catch enough in three or four days for a month," Allen
says. "These days, you pull your heart and soul together, and use
your head the best you can, and somehow you get it through another
season."

Fishing communities such as Port Orford, nestled
on the western side of the Cascade Range, have a story line
that’s familiar to any Western rancher, farmer or logger.
Declining resources, global markets and corporatization plague
small family fishing operations. In the last 15 years, the number
of Oregon boats fishing for salmon has declined by 82 percent.

In Port Orford, pop. 1,000, the median household income
in 1999 was $23,289, just a little over half the state average. As
in other parts of the rural West, children leave in search of
better opportunities, draining small towns of their future.

Change is as inevitable as the wind, but locals here in
Port Orford, pushed to the limits of hope, want to believe that
they can chart their own course through this crisis, steering past
sluggish government policy and a collapsing fishery. Allen is part
of the Port Orford Ocean Resource Team, a novel effort in
community-based fisheries management. He and his compatriots hope
to unite a diverse group of government officials, environmentalists
and members of the often-splintered fishing industry, and bring the
fish — and the backbone of their community — back from
the brink.

"Everybody’s trying to figure out how to
make a living, and no one wants to give up," says Allen. "Fishing
is a lot like farming — it’s not a job, it’s a
traditional way of life. The ocean gets in your blood, and
it’s hard to stay away."

But the group has a lot to
prove. After all, fishermen, spurred by government mismanagement,
created the mess in the first place.

From bounty to bust

Perched on a rocky bluff
exposed to the open ocean, Port Orford is a border town on the
brink of a liquid country. Wild storms batter the edge of the town,
and every evening, fishermen must haul out their boats with a crane
and store them on trailers high on a concrete dock. Nonetheless,
the town has long drawn fishermen and women to partake in the
bounty of what was, until recently, the last lawless frontier of
the wild West.

From the back of his parked salmon troller
— a 32-foot boat rigged with poles hung off either side like
two arms — 71-year-old Bill Cobb looks out over the other
wind-stranded boats and remembers what it was like when he left
logging and got into the fishing business nearly 40 years ago.
"Things were hot around here," he says. "You were ashamed to come
back to dock if you didn’t have over 100 fish. Them was the
good times."

In the early 1970s, an industry free-for-all
was raging on the public seas. It wasn’t unlike what was
happening on the West’s public lands, where cattle devoured
native grasslands and loggers clear-cut the old-growth trees. But
in the Interior West, there were agencies that at least paid lip
service to management. Out on the open water, no one even pretended
to be in control. In fact, when the federal government did decide
to oversee the fishing industry, it only spurred a frenzied race
for more fish.

At the time, foreigners were catching the
majority of fish off American shores, and the U.S. was importing 76
percent of its seafood. In 1976, Congress passed the
Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act in an
effort to safeguard the nation’s food supply. Suddenly, the
Magnuson Act, which decreed that only Americans could fish within
200 miles of the shore, created a huge, exclusive hunting grounds.
And government subsidies, such as tax-deferred loans for boats,
meant that practically everyone could afford to buy a new boat. The
new Pacific Fishery Management Council (one of eight created by the
Magnuson Act), was dominated by fishermen and seemed to allow
endless days on the open water.

Of course, it
couldn’t last forever. Rampant overfishing — combined
with dams, logging and grazing that blocked and sullied salmon
spawning streams — led to the steep decline of the Pacific
salmon fishery. To compound the problem for fishermen, in the
1980s, a rapid rise in farmed fish in both Norway and Canada
slashed prices for wild fish by nearly half (HCN, 3/17/03: Bracing
against the tide).

"You’d drive down the street,
and half the houses had for-sale signs. A bunch of guys lost their
boats to the finance company," says Gary Anderson, Port
Orford’s port manager, sitting in his snug office on the
sea.

As salmon prices and stocks dwindled,
many fishermen turned to groundfish as well as crab and shrimp. Tax
credits and technological advances spawned another big shipbuilding
boom; this time, it was large trawlers, many as long as 90 feet,
that drag nets of up to 75 feet wide, scooping the ocean floor.
(These are not to be confused with 300-foot "factory" trawlers,
found mostly in Alaska, which process and package fish on the open
ocean.) The large boats, many of them owned by corporations, can
bring in 50,000 pounds of fish in a day — enough to feed
100,000 people a hefty dinner portion. They also inadvertently kill
many fish too small for market, as well as off-season halibut and
endangered or threatened species, such as salmon. To avoid
penalties for catching fish, such as salmon, that trawlers
aren’t permitted to catch, crews toss the dead fish, or
"bycatch," overboard.

Port Orford never went big-time.
Most Port Orford fishermen are long-liners, who catch groundfish
from smaller boats, using ropes as much as three miles long,
festooned with squid-baited hooks. The town’s crane
can’t haul boats bigger than 40 feet up to its dry-dock port,
so local boats have had to stay small.

As the trawlers
raked in groundfish, says Anderson, prices dropped more quickly
than a silver dollar down a well. But trawlers were wrecking more
than just the market. "You watch those big nets, and I always
figured they were hurting the habitat. People talk about how you
would see hundreds of dead fish floating behind the boats," says
Anderson, adding that federal managers have always ignored the
small-boat owners in Port Orford, listening rather to the
revenue-producing trawl owners. "I remember we tried to talk to the
council about this years ago, but they didn’t listen. They
waited until there was a crisis to do anything."

This
crisis-driven management is characteristic of the councils. Created
to propel the industry, the councils weren’t adept at solving
complex problems. With meetings only five times a year, the board
is pressed to conceive of a long-term strategy.

"There
was a bycatch problem the day I got here 15 years ago, but the
council was overwhelmed with 100 other issues and so the issue kept
getting put off. Only now, when it’s become a crisis, are
they trying to figure out what to do. It’s the same pattern
over and over," says Gilbert Sylvia, a professor of marine
resources economics at Oregon State University in Newport, Ore.
"That’s not managing; that’s reacting to problems only
after they’ve occurred."

By the early 1990s, in the
absence of proactive management by the councils, local fishermen
saw their worst fears confirmed. Salmon landed on the endangered
species list, and many local runs were destroyed. In 1993, an
estimated 83 coho salmon returned to the Elk River just north of
town, down from the over 2,000 fish captured there in 1927.
Similarly, in Dry Creek, a few miles to the north, chinook runs
were just 20 percent of average. By 1995, Port Orford fishermen
were landing only 789,000 pounds of groundfish, almost half the
average of the 1980s.

Even as the evidence mounted, the
Fishery Council, run in part by the very people who were doing the
damage, did nothing. The dysfunctional system spawned chaos and
management failure that wreaked havoc on the industry — and
more significantly — harmed the ocean.

Stormy seas

If trawler owner Ralph Brown were
a truck, he’d have eight cylinders. Strong and broad
shouldered, Brown is a powerful guy: As one of eight public Pacific
Fishery Management Council members appointed by the secretary of
Commerce, Brown helps to create management plans for fisheries in
federal waters throughout the West Coast.

Aside from
Brown and a long-line fisherman, the council is composed of six
recreational fishermen, one tribal member, one representative of
NOAA Fisheries and one from each of the four state fisheries
agencies in the region.

But sitting in his office in Gold
Beach, 30 miles south of Port Orford, he talks about the irony of
the situation. The public seats on the fishery councils have long
been occupied by fishermen. But there’s been constant
squabbling among the various fishing interests.

"It’s kind of funny: I’m a trawler, and I’m
probably viewed as an arch-enemy to most people," says Brown. "But
I’m supposed to represent the entire industry."

For
decades, the fishermen who dominated the council — especially
revenue-rich trawlers, who have more political clout — were
loath to wean themselves from their income source. Although NOAA
Fisheries — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s Fisheries Service (formerly the National
Marine Fisheries Service) — has final authority for all
management plans, it rarely interferes with any of the eight
regional councils.

It has been only recently, with
exploitation at crisis proportions — 70 percent of all U.S.
ocean species are overfished, according to a study by Oceana, an
international, D.C.-based nonprofit — that things have
shifted. In 1996, spurred by several environmental lawsuits,
Congress reformed the Magnuson Act, mandating that the councils
must put conservation over economics when formulating management
plans. Now, each year, based on the limited available science, the
council sets stock-specific harvest limits that it estimates
won’t damage the sustainability of the species. Fishermen
then buy permits that entitle them to a fixed share of the catch.

It is hard to tell if this new direction will work.
Because the Magnuson Act created a fishery intent on exploitation,
research was never a priority. The science used for these
management decisions is marginal at best. All the baseline data for
how many groundfish exist come from surveys of trawlers that are
conducted every three years. These big ships sail along the
continental shelf (between three and 100 miles offshore) and never
near the rocky and shallow areas where species like rockfish live.
With such limited information, the council has no knowledge of
about 75 percent of the stocks in its charge. "It’s like
trying to survey elk by only looking at the edges of where they
like to live," says Brown, rolling his eyes. "We’re stuck.
We’re making decisions based on suspect information."

Brown and other leaders in the industry have come to
believe that reducing the number of fishermen is the only way to
ensure that fishing continues. In November, Congress spent $46
million to buy out half of the West Coast groundfishing trawl
fleet, permanently retiring 92 trawl vessels in an attempt to
sustain both the resource and the communities. Buyouts have already
been implemented twice on the East Coast. But here in Port Orford,
locals worry that they won’t help the fishery recover.
Trawler owners who sold out can still buy new boats and new fishing
permits for other species, such as crab or shrimp, creating more
pressure in another part of the ocean.

"If you’re
selling out, you should sell out forever. It certainly
doesn’t help us if those guys come back," says Geraldine
Rickel, the town dog-groomer, as she washes the last suds from the
eyes of a large brown mutt. It also seems unfair, says Rickel, that
the big-boat owners, who have done the most damage to the ocean,
each received hundreds of thousands of dollars in the buyout
— while those remaining in the fishing industry will repay
more than half the buyout cost through new taxes. Rickel’s
husband, Dave, who fishes for black cod, adds, "Government
isn’t looking at the big picture. It just seems like
they’re listening to the big guys because they deliver
millions of pounds of product and they have all the power."

A local
solution

Into this political eddy walks a hardscrabble
community group, trying to inject a local voice in the big picture.
Laura Anderson arrived in Port Orford three years ago, asking
fishermen a lot of questions about the topic they love to hate
— marine reserves. Hired as a consultant by Environmental
Defense to study reception to the idea along the Oregon coast,
Anderson, the daughter of a fisherman, wasn’t surprised to
hear the cries of frustration.

But she found something
else that surprised and excited her. This is a town where people
don’t lock their doors. If someone is hurt or lost at sea,
most of the town heads down to the port to help. Anderson hopes the
same goes for a lost industry.

"These fishermen seemed
really engaged in the conversation. They’re really relatively
cohesive," says Anderson. "It seemed like a place where a different
approach might work."

A former Peace Corps volunteer,
Anderson spent several years in the mid-’90s helping a
village in the Philippines restore its coral reef fishery, using
what’s been termed community-based management. The idea,
implemented for centuries in places like Japan, is simple,
theoretically: Give people responsibility for management and they
will face the consequences if they fail to conserve the resource.

Seeing such collaborative efforts through requires
charismatic grassroots leadership, and Anderson hit the jackpot in
Leesa Cobb, a sassy local whose family has lived in Port Orford
since the Civil War.

"When salmon gave out, we shifted to
groundfish. Now groundfish is tough. It is critical that we manage
everything we have left, so we don’t have any more crashes,"
says Cobb, sitting in a foldout chair in her small one-room office
just off Port Orford’s main street. Born of ranchers and now
married into a fishing family (she’s Bill Cobb’s
daughter-in-law), she adds, "Large-scale management isn’t
working. The council ignores small communities all the time. We
have to try this or nothing will ever get better."

In
November 2001, after receiving funding from the state, NOAA
Fisheries, Environmental Defense and several charitable
foundations, Cobb and Anderson rented a shop in town and opened the
nonprofit Port Orford Ocean Resource Team (POORT). It’s an
effort to make good, science-based recommendations to the Fishery
Council about how best to manage the local fishery. And while there
are no guarantees that the Fishery Council will accept
POORT’s recommendations, both the federal and state
governments have encouraged POORT’s work.

"Two
heads are better than one. I think this can help us do a better
job," says Elizabeth Clarke, a fisheries expert at the
Seattle-based Northwest Fisheries Science Center, a research arm of
NOAA Fisheries, which helped give POORT over $100,000. "The local
knowledge about the resource provides us with better information,
engages the community and helps us with compliance."

In
an effort to fill in the blank spots and questionable assumptions
about the local fishery, POORT turned to Oregon State University
for help. A graduate student is conducting interviews with all the
local fishermen to create a database of geology, water depth and
fish habitat. The data will be folded into a GIS mapping project of
the area that will include existing data produced by the state.
With some help from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the
team has also started to conduct its own research, weighing and
counting fish from the local reef to get a better idea of the size
and age of local fish populations.

The team
won’t begin to draw up any management recommendations until
the research phase is completed. But it is already putting
important pieces into place. In the last two years, the team has
created an advisory board of fishermen; so far, 70 percent of local
boat-owners are on board. POORT acts as a facilitator between that
board and a scientific advisory board of environmentalists, Oregon
State University professors and the Oregon Department of Fish and
Wildlife. The scientists are helping the fishermen create
management plans, conduct research and design a new regulatory
framework. All of that will culminate as early as 2005 in a
proposed management plan, including fishing quotas, for Pacific
Fishery Council. The team also plans to develop a marketing
strategy for local fish, which could include either a Port Orford
brand or value-added products such as smoked fish.

There
remain a dizzying number of critical details to work out,
including, eventually, a position on marine reserves. Local
fishermen dislike the concept, which would restrict fishing in
certain areas. But environmentalists and government officials hope
that POORT will enable local fishermen to participate in management
decisions and to buy into the reserve idea. While Cobb says she
knows the team will ultimately have to "confront" whether marine
reserves will be a part of their plan, at this point the group is
focusing on less contentious issues.

All in all, the Port
Orford project is a daunting task. It means taking on not only a
legacy of local powerlessness, but also overcoming the foreign
competition fostered by globalization. Seventy-seven percent of all
fish consumed in the U.S. are imported, according to the United
Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Perhaps the $64,000 question forPort Orford fishermen is why they
should be trusted to manage the sea, after decades spent pillaging
it. Peter Shelley, the vice president of the Maine-based
Conservation Law Foundation — which has worked with a similar
community-based management effort among Maine lobstermen —
says POORT’s approach may offer a solution to the underlying
issue driving overfishing. Fishermen in the United States have
never been limited to a certain region, he explains; if fishermen
overfish salmon in central Oregon, they can buy permits for Alaska
or California. And corporations that own big trawl boats care even
less about maintaining a local resource.

"If fishermen
only fish in their local area, it forces them to think about
sustainability, because if they don’t, they’re out of a
job," says Shelley. "It’s been proven that large
conglomerates (like the big trawl boats or agribusinesses)
don’t produce stewardship, because they can leave at any
time. In the long term, communities have the right incentive and
are in a position to be the best stewards of the resource."

He points to the Maine lobstermen, the only other example
of community-based fishery management in the Lower 48. In the past
six years, that group has gotten the state Legislature to authorize
its management plan, and convinced even environmentalists that
it’s worth supporting. It might be a coincidence, but since
that effort began, Maine has seen record high levels of lobsters.
While a long, uncertain path lies ahead, both the Maine lobstermen
and the Port Orford fishermen hope to ignite other, similar efforts
up and down the coasts. "These fragile little experiments in
responsible sustainable fisheries are the crystals around which
reform for fisheries management will come," says Shelley.

For Port Orford locals like Leesa Cobb and Harry
Allen, the experiment offers a glimmer of light in an otherwise
bleak outlook.

On a clear day, when the wind is kind,
Cobb walks among her neighbors down by the port. "We fish in this
area every day," she says, "and if we lose this, I’m not sure
what a lot of us would go and do. Our commitment doesn’t get
much stronger than that. We want to make sure there’s a
future here for our entire community."